Wilkerson v. Texas

1989-10-17

Headline: Court denies review and leaves a death sentence intact despite prosecutor admitting race helped remove Black jurors, prompting a Justice’s dissent warning that jury selection remains vulnerable to racial bias.

Holding: The Court denied review and left the Texas death sentence in place despite a prosecutor admitting race influenced peremptory strikes removing Black jurors.

Real World Impact:

Allows the Texas death sentence to remain after jurors were removed for race.
Keeps an all-white jury verdict in place despite prosecutor admitting race influenced strikes.
Highlights limits of Batson protections when prosecutors give mixed or race-tainted explanations.

Topics: racial discrimination in juries, death penalty, jury selection, criminal appeals

Summary

Background

Richard Wilkerson, an African-American man, was convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. During jury selection the prosecution used four of its twelve peremptory strikes to remove all potential Black jurors. After trial, Wilkerson raised a claim that those strikes were racially motivated under Batson v. Kentucky, and a state trial court held he had made a prima facie showing but ultimately found no purposeful discrimination. At a later hearing, a prosecutor conceded that race was a factor in some strikes.

Reasoning

The central question in the dissent is whether a prosecutor may lawfully strike jurors when the decision rests on both race-neutral reasons and race-conscious factors. Justice Marshall argues the state court improperly ignored the prosecutor’s admissions and applied an incorrect “but for” approach that would require proving a counterfactual—whether the prosecutor would have struck the juror had the juror been white. Marshall explains that standards borrowed from other contexts cannot work here because peremptory strikes are subjective and leave no record for comparison.

Real world impact

Because the Court denied review, the Texas conviction and death sentence remain in place. The dissent warns this outcome shows limits in enforcing Batson: when prosecutors offer mixed or race-tainted explanations, courts may struggle to detect subtle discrimination. Marshall says that unless courts demand truly race-free explanations, racial discrimination in jury selection will persist.

Dissents or concurrances

Justice Marshall (joined by Justice Brennan) would have granted review and vacated the death sentence and would interpret Batson to require wholly nonracial reasons for strikes.